


Contradictions

by halcyonwhispers



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Darktalia, F/M, Historical References, Mentions of Rape, Stockholm Syndrome, memory laspe, semi-dark elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 23:11:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6170410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyonwhispers/pseuds/halcyonwhispers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, you would’ve spat and clawed, beating back, but that was in the before, and oh. you think you l*** him.</p>
<p>(take his gentle kisses and smiles, swear your short centuries of life, lives, to him, for he was something great and wonderful and warm)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contradictions

**Author's Note:**

> I remember laughing while writing this because I actually had to research dates and historical events/accounts. If anything is badly represented, sorry. But I wanted to see if I could write a Taiwan/Japan as something in this era where it was known how horrible Taiwan was treated. 
> 
> Such as, many of the Taiwanese women were forced into prostitution, “Comfort Camps”, to sexually please the Japanese men. But Japan was also very proud of its newly taken colony, and kinda wanted to show the rest of the world how it managed to take control of it so “easily.” 
> 
> History.

October 25, 1945

She was tossed around through a small crowd of people. It was only a month after America had dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and everything was still in shambles. She knew that no matter how much Japan wished to help his people, he must take care of himself first or else all hope was lost for the Japanese people.

Someone gave her a rough shave, causing her to almost fall into one of many dirt roads that were common to rural places such as this. Mei frowned but retook back her balanced almost at once. She had to find him.

He would go recover in the areas where the least amount of damage was done. Yet even here, the air was thick with terror and tears. Many cried for their lost ones that were in the bombing, others were cursing the Americans, and some were cursing the very war itself.

Mei turned away from the sea of sadness and raced to the countryside, and after several hours wondering around the wilderness of Japan, she finally found one of Japan’s houses.

They had liked to spend time there, just listening to the sounds of the birds and hearing what noises the wind would make. Taiwan knew that these days innocent day were behind them but… _Things will be different_ , she thought as she neared the tiny house, _but it doesn’t mean we can’t be happy anymore._

The small wind chime that was tied to a tree let out a small cry, as if Taiwan’s return had startled the tiny chime.

Wondering near the front porch, surprise dashed on her features at the sight of the sliding door slightly opened. Mei peered in to see if anyone besides Japan was in the house. Seeing no one in sight, Mei licked her dry lips before she started her slow and heart pounding search for her friend.

(your dearest)

(your l***)

Suddenly, passing by one of the rooms, the floor boards creaked as if weight had pushed itself on them. As Taiwan tiptoed inside the quiet and seemly deserted home, the voice of her mentor came through her head to warm her once more. The girl shook the thought out of her head. Of course what China said wasn’t true. Kiku would never hurt her.

She paused in front of her old room.

Her hand stilled on the doorframe, her heart throbbing on her tongue, before sliding it open. “J- Japan?”

There. He sat in the middle of the room, simply sitting there and looking out the opened window. A breeze came through at that moment, the wind reaching for her and making wisps of his black hair sway. The smell of blood and opened flesh overpowered her nostrils.

A hand shot up to her mouth in horror as she realized how injured he was. It made China look like he was in a playground brawl.

Japan leaned against the wall, shirtless, only his military jacket draped tiredly over his thin shoulders, and in any other case, Taiwan would have flushed in embarrassment if she wasn’t so horrified.

(good girl mei, perfect, good my mei, my mei)

It was plain to see that any tighter garments would only bother the gruesome wounds underneath.  Bandages were all over his chest and stomach to help stop the bleeding, but it was useless. Blood still bleed through, showing Taiwan the hidden images of the cuts. One in particular made her gasp. An angry red, it started from the right side of his hip to his left shoulder, covering his whole upper body, the torn flesh, irritated, and inflamed under the bandage. The Japanese man must have bandaged more than then half of his body in order to cover all of his wounds.

Also barefooted, he showed off feet that were blacken and covered in blisters. His face… _Oh Kiku…_ she thought. There was a thin cut trailing from the left corner of his mouth to the tip of his left eyebrow, and on his other eye, a purple flower blooming on the milky white skin.

“Japan!” She yelled and the short distance between to him before throwing her arms around his shoulders. “Oh Japan…Kiku!” Tears threaten to spill over her eyes, yet she forced herself not too. She had to be strong for him. “How could America do this for you?!”

“Mei…” he breathed out softly as he touched her shoulders.  There was blankness in his voice that matched his face.

“I’m going to help you Kiku! I pro–”

“Leave.”

She pulled back, shock in her amber eyes. “Wa- what?”

He started at her with a horrible blank expression. His eyes were filled with something she could not name; something dark and sad, so terribly sad. “Leave and don’t come back.” He shifted his dark eyes to the window once more.

“Kiku! Please! I can’t leave you like this! I have to help you–”

“You help me?” Kiku turned his head to her. His face suddenly grew a hard layer of intensity. He stood up, making himself tower over Taiwan’s kneeling form. “You help me?” Japan repeated. Mei stood and swallowed before beginning to take several slow small steps backwards. This couldn’t be Kiku, no way was this her Kiku, not this person with empty eyes and brutal features.

“America bombed me,” his voice was so deathly calm and quiet that Taiwan could only stare. “My people are still recovering from these losses. They blame everyone and everything. Why? Because the truth that their own people having brought this death upon them is too much to think about. So many lives were lost, so many people who had nothing to do with the fighting. Germany and Italy have long been finished this war. I had to keep on; even when I knew everything was supposed to be over… I went on. I had to go on.”

As he spoke, Japan took one slow step after until their faces were so close that Taiwan could feel his hot breath on her face. He was so calm…How could he stay like this? Especially his eyes. How could those beautiful dark eyes that were always filled with warmth become so…blank. There was nothing in his eyes. It was as if when America bombed him, Japan lost something inside.

“Look where it got me. Everyone is _dying_!” Taiwan flinched at the sudden volume of his voice before it returned to its tone of tranquility. “I can’t take care of you, Taiwan. Leave. Leave and don’t come back.”

 He turned away from her and went on to stare out the window. They both could hear a nest of birds and their newborn chicks somewhere in a tree outside the opened window.

She stared, completely unsure how to react to what had just happened. His words were felt like a slap and it left her whole body stinging. Yet she couldn’t just leave him. China’s warning echoed in her mind but she just tossed the thought away again. The room felt too small and too big at the same time. There seemed to be too much room in-between them, and then it felt like there wasn’t enough.

(love, sweetest love, so sweet, so soft)

(hurt hurt, pain, there are too many tears in your eyes, why, blood)

A pressure in her eyes made the lid twitch as the ghosting of something weeping in the past traced its fingers down the ridges of her spine. It made her head ache and her memory whimper. No, no. Japan. Japan.

“P-please Kiku, you know you don’t mean that. We can work together to-” Mei stretched out a hand. _Please…don’t leave me Kiku…please… you can’t. You’re all I have, all I’ll ever want._

“Get out.” Taiwan pulled back sharply but didn’t give up.

“I won’t leave! I have to help you….Kiku please…  I want to be here. We-” Japan jerked up from his spot, coming in close to her once again. She stepped back only to have backed herself into the wall, blocking her escape.

Her legs trembled and there was an urge to raise her hands, to submit and beg.

He stared into her amber orbs. Taiwan willed herself not to look away, a contradiction, but she couldn’t. Her gaze fell to the floor like a coward. It was only then that she noticed the broken picture frames scattered around the room. From the earliest pictures that were taken of them at Taiwan’s first summer festival with Japan to the one of them two years ago with her in uniform, holding the flag of Japan and trailing after him.

He had broken each and every one of them.

(don’t touch don’t touch stop. shh, darling girl, love, sweetest darling, shhh)

“Do you know how it was right after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima?” Mei stayed silent. “The Americans called it ‘Little Boy.’ How could something like that massacre over 10,000 innocent people? Can you imagine that? One minute everything is fine and then, not even a second later, you’re gone. You don’t exist anymore. Those people didn’t know what was happening. Everything just _stopped_.”

 An arm shot out and Taiwan could only stand there, shaking in her shoes and stared. Mei waited to feel the fierce pain slam onto her face.

(once upon a time, you would’ve spat and clawed, beating back, but that was in the before, and oh. you think you l*** him)

(mei.)

(doesn’t hurt anymore, he adores you, everything is just as it should be)

But it didn’t come. Instead she felt something drip onto her shoulder. For some strange reason, Taiwan imagined that it somehow began to rain inside the house.

Mei slowly turned her head to her shoulder, spying Kiku’s fist just laid only a few inches above the cloth of her white dress. Blood. Droplets of the color of red stained her there. One drop, two drops, then four, five…blood. Kiku’s blood. Her knees shook with such force she had to lean on the wall behind her to stand up.

The air escaped her lungs and deep loads escaped her lips very much like pants. Mei kept her eyes to the floor, to all of their memories just lying broken on the ground, very much like they were right then. When she finally glanced up, Kiku’s face was grave, intense, angry, tired and yet it was all somehow covered by a dangerously calm mask. His eyes were still gone. There was nothing there at all.

 “How could you _ever_ help me?”

A powerful twisting feeling took a hold of her heart, a knife sluggishly slicing it in half. The tender flesh easily gave in as the blood dripped onto the hands of the holder. Yet he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop as butchered her heart, nor did Kiku stop at the sight of her tears. They ran over the rims of her lower lids and tiptoed slowly down her once rosy cheeks to meet her chin.

Kiku leaned in and whispered in her ear, “You’re his again. Don’t come back.”

“No….” She kept from her voice from braking, “Kiku… I don’t want to leave….” Taiwan sounded like a little girl again. Not wanting to leave another house only to travel to a new foreign one. Japan was her home. Kiku was her home.

(he whispered that in the shell if  your ear a thousand and one times when he visited you in your roomcagecagecage)  

“I love you,” Taiwan uttered hoarsely. _Don’t leave me._

Something inside of Kiku snapped. The thick rope that he had built in the beginning of the war to keep his sanity in check had withered away to a short and fragile string. Mei unknowingly took the scissors and snapped the fragile connection to reality. 

Kiku took her roughly by the shoulders. His fingers dug into her skin through her clothes, bruising her. He dragged her to the stand where a shattered mirror stood. Taiwan cried out and tried in vain to tear herself away from Japan after he grabbed a fistful of chestnut hair. He thrust her face into the broken glass, not close enough to cause her harm but just enough that she could make out the broken glass distorting her image.

“I gave you everything because you were a doll. I took you because it was ideal,” Japan snapped against her ear, words burning into her. “I…raped you.”   

(i love you mei, you’re everything)

(her people bled themselves and sobbed, her women tossed to his men to crave their hunger, and all she could do was pretend)

(the agony dulled)

(so take the jewels offered, daintily sip at the tea, resist to need to splash in the mud puddles and race into streams, give your body and heart, your soul, maybe you’ll live)

(I love you, Kiku.)

(and when you felt it true, you were too dazed to feel horrified)

Mei’s face was a mess. Her large amber eyes were bloodshot and swollen, her hair a tangled jumble on her head, and there in her salty tears was the sensation of her heart dying in his hands.

Raped. Love. Love. Raped. Raped.

“No more, Taiwan. You cannot help me.” Japan released her. He moved away, limping until he reached the window, back to her.

_But,_ she thought. Conflicts swayed her memories and her emotions, and she wished she could die.

(when did it stopped hurting and when did it shift into fuzzy ease and flawlessness?)

Her feet took one step at a time, turning her own back, footsteps nothing in the hearing range of another passing wind. She stepped on the threshold of the doorway, catching the tiniest, weakest weeping of, “I can’t help you,” and walked out of their forgotten home, and into the countryside of Japan.

Taiwan walked until the bottom of her soles soaked in with the blood of her aching feet, mind set on Kiku.

Kiku. Kiku. Kiku.

(take his gentle kisses and smiles, swear your short centuries of life, lives, to him, for he was something great and wonderful and _warm_ )

Why?

The question scared her. Terrified beyond what she was thought it was possible to be afraid of. Walking made her think. To think was bad. Evil.

More tears blocked her vision; they refused to let her see anything, so she decided to run, to run away as far as she could as fast as she could. Mei wouldn’t stop. She ran and ran until her lungs felt like they were on fire. They scorched and beseeched her to stop and rest. She didn’t break until an uprooted tree root finally blocked her from going on anywhere else. She crashed down to the ground with her hands outstretched in front of her body.

Mei gazed at her hands. A sharp stone had barrowed itself into the callused flesh of her palm. Thick droplets of crimson liquid trickled down her palms to her wrist, it raced down her arm, and finally the small river of blood stopped at the crook of her elbow. She had scrapped them pretty badly as everything else.

(keep making you love more and more until you break, and then, you’ll love him even more)

The personification of Taiwan looked up at the night sky; her gaze became captured by the millions and billions of shining bright colorful stars and the huge beautiful white moon. Her eyes filled with more tears. Pale sender hands marked with a stream of blood reached up to them.

 She let out a torturous scream that shook the whole countryside. “ _You liar! You murder! I loved you!_ ” she sobbed loudly, throat closing in on itself. “ _Kiku, I still-!_ ” Her blood stained arms wrapped themselves around her in an effort to try to comfort herself when there wasn’t anyone else too. Mei kneeled over until her forehead touch the ground and continued to scream, the overwhelming grief kneeing her in the stomach.

She screamed and screamed until her voice began to give out. She laid on her side, completely and utterly numb with anguish, almost dead with it, like hurt had personified and its hand had begun to choke her.

_“Mei, after all of this, will you stay with me?”_

Rape. Suffering. Love. Happiness. Tears. Promises. Rape. Love. Love. Love.

_“Will_ you _stay with me?”_

Lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

_“Of course.”_

_“There you have it then.”_

Falling in love is death.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok. So this is the edited version of something I posted on DA in ’14 when I was 14, so took me a while to clean it up. If anyone ever finds the older version, remember that this exists and come over here. 
> 
> This ship need more love, more fics, cause yeah, OTP. Obviously it is, they are in pain in this. Even though I’m not in the fandom that much anymore, it’s still good to peek in once in a while. Like, my fem!US/UK fic, that might never really get done. I’ve been thinking on just writing a one-shot and scraping the rest. 
> 
> Kudos and comments are always welcomed!


End file.
